electron Memes

Discord literally had to implement a self-destruct feature because it was eating so much RAM that it became a liability. When your app is such a memory hog that you need to add a "restart before I crash the entire system" failsafe, maybe—just maybe—wrapping a website in Chromium wasn't the best architectural decision. The fact that 4GB is the threshold tells you everything. That's more RAM than entire operating systems used to need. But hey, at least Discord is self-aware enough to restart itself. Most Electron apps just sit there, bloated and unrepentant, slowly consuming your system resources like a digital black hole until you manually kill them. Fun fact: Each Electron app bundles its own copy of Chromium. So if you're running Discord, Slack, VS Code, and Spotify simultaneously, congratulations—you're running four separate browsers just to use what could've been native apps or actual websites.

When RAM prices quadruple in less than a year and your entire business model is "just download more Chrome tabs," you're gonna have a bad time. Electron devs watching their apps go from "slightly bloated" to "mortgage payment" in system requirements. That sweating guy meme face says it all—they're out here shipping desktop apps that bundle an entire Chromium browser just to display a to-do list, and now users need to take out a loan to afford the RAM. For context: Electron lets you build desktop apps with web technologies, which is convenient but notoriously memory-hungry since each app basically runs its own browser instance. When RAM was cheap, nobody cared. Now? Your Slack, Discord, and VS Code are collectively eating more resources than a small data center.

Remember when building a cross-platform desktop app seemed like a good idea? Just wrap an entire Chromium browser around your glorified calculator app, they said. It'll be fine, they said. Now every todo list app on your machine is basically running its own copy of Chrome, each one hogging more RAM than your entire OS did in 2010. Your 32GB of RAM? Gone. Your fans spinning up for a chat app? Normal. Your CPU crying because you opened Slack, VS Code, Discord, and Spotify at the same time? Just another Tuesday. The real kicker? RAM prices are skyrocketing because everyone's buying GPUs for AI training, so now you get to pay premium prices to run five instances of Chromium just to check your messages. What a time to be alive.

Electron apps: where your simple to-do list needs 800MB of RAM because why optimize when you can just ship an entire Chromium browser with it? The developer confidently explains their revolutionary idea while someone from a timeline where RAM actually costs money arrives to stop this madness. But modern devs don't care—memory is cheap and abundant, so let's just bundle V8, Node.js, and the kitchen sink for that calculator app. Meanwhile, embedded systems engineers are weeping in a corner with their 64KB constraints.

JavaScript pouring itself into literally everything like that one coworker who volunteers for projects they have no business touching. "Oh, you need a toaster? I can run in a browser." The framework fatigue is real - we're one npm package away from JavaScript-powered coffee makers that require 3GB of node_modules to heat water.

The irony is absolutely chef's kiss! Electron.js claims to be "small and fast" while being notorious in the dev community for being exactly the opposite. It's basically the framework that lets you build desktop apps with web technologies, but at the cost of your users' RAM and CPU cycles. Your computer fans spinning up to takeoff velocity after opening a simple Slack or Discord app? Yep, that's Electron working its "small and fast" magic. The atomic symbol is just the perfect cherry on top of this glorious contradiction.